Putting learning to work: Knowledge transitions from continuing professional education to museum workplaces

As an initial qualitative enquiry into the dynamics of learning transfer in the museum sector, this dissertation explores a range of largely positive learning transfer experiences within four museum case settings, and highlights the interdependent roles of museum climates and learners' agency in supporting prolonged and complex processes of adapting learning to meet situated needs. Key findings from a cross-case thematic analysis include the influential roles that learners' mastery of content, positional autonomy, perception of affordances, dispositions, values and goals, initiative and professional affiliations play in initiating transfer in museum contexts that tend to be inspiring, rewarding, but benignly un-strategic in their efforts to support the transfer of learning. The author's focus on learning that continues after participants leave the classroom illuminates how complex, situated, subjective, and meaningful continuing professional education can be in museum setting--and how it continues to involve the learner and the museum long after the educator's work is done.

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